A few days back, Adobe announced Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), which was known as Strobe earlier.

A few minutes back, I received an email confirming that Open Source Media Framework website is up with all the information, specification, developer-documentation, source (Subversion repository), downloads (binary and source) and bug-database.

Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) has an interesting list of features and goals. I like it’s plug-in architecture, that would allow a lot of extensibility and various amazing plug-ins from different providers in coming time.

If you are a developer spending a lot of time developing various work-flows around online media-players (audio, video, images – players), I strongly recommend you to check out Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). I am sure, you would find it worth start using it and also contribute back whatever you can.

Following are the reasons, I am going to use OSMF and give up my existing frameworks:

• It’s open-source
• It would solve core issues (video playback, delivery and workarounds for various limitations in Flash Player, etc)
• It would adopt various standards (playback, cdn, advertising, etc)
• Larger developer base, that means bug fixes and various features would be available very often
• I love open-source and see myself contributing to OSMF in future, beyond my current projects.

YouTube has announced a lot of new features:-

• Updated API to allow CRUD – Create, read, update and delete – operations
• Upload API
• Chromeless Player
• Player’s JavaScript API
• H.264 videos – Notice the high-quality playback link below videos on youtube

This is really amazing, we can build kick-ass applications that would use YouTube’s platform for media upload, conversion (trans coding) and delivery, seamlessly.

I am yet to confirm, how easy it is to load and control YouTube’s player in our Flash/Flex apps? Controlling loaded SWFs is hard, unless it allows cross-site scripting through Security.allowDomain (”loaderdomain.com”). I hope, some day Flash Player would have more Security APIs, which would let us expose a set of interfaces to loaders (SWF loads another swf from different domain).

In any case, we can overlay iframe/div to show the video. That’s what I am doing for Yahoo! Live Mashup.

Update (March 12, 2008): YouTube’s chromeless player can be loaded in Flash/Flex applications and can be controlled. That’s what I heard Geoff Stearns, Flash Engineer in YouTube and SWFObject developer, saying in this video.

Technorati Tags: youtube, api, crud, upload, video, chromless, player, h.264

I started looking at the latest version of Adobe Media Player(AMP) available on Adobe Labs. I notice lots of improvements, be it user-interface or performance or content-coverage, that is, more feeds/videos are available to watch.

Lots of audio/video podcasts can be played in Adobe Flash runtime. I wrote some code to check if videos from Podtech, Diggnation etc, and it works without doing anything extra. All credit goes to new video/audio capabilities (H.264 and AAC) in Adobe Flash runtime (player/air).

The only thing I miss in AMP is to be able to add custom rss-feeds, for example, AMP doesn’t show Podtech and Diggnation videos for some reason, if I can add those feeds to AMP that would be great.

Over all, AMP is good piece of work.

Technorati Tags: adobe, mediaplayer, podcast, video, rss